Past Episodes.
S1E11.
“It’s a language that adults don’t understand.”
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Jon Savage: resistance is not futile.
Published: Apr 1, 2025.
“The biggest band in the world, The Beatles, was packaged by a gay manager. So, the queer influence on pop music is extraordinary.”
INTRODUCTION By the mid-seventies, England was on the brink of a cultural shift. The decline of industry, the lingering effects of post-war austerity, and growing disillusionment created a climate ripe for anarchy. In this unrest, punk emerged raw, rebellious, and defiant.
Offering a powerful response to a society desperate for transformation. Fanzines like Sniffing Glue were key in documenting and driving the conversation. Music, design, and culture collided in new groundbreaking ways and magazines like Sounds and Melody Maker didn’t just report on the scene. They shaped it.
Voices such as Caroline Coon, Linder Sterling, Barney Bubbles, and Paul Morley pushed the boundaries of music, fashion, and graphic design in new unconventional ways. But they didn’t just witness the change, they were at the forefront of defining it, carving out a space where rebellion and self-expression would forever alter popular culture.
RICHARD SMITH: Few people have championed the merits of youth culture more than my guest today. Upon graduating from Cambridge University, he published his first fanzine London’s Outrage in 1976, which landed him his first job at the music magazine Sounds – much to his parent’s dismay.
He’s written definitive histories of punk and the evolution of teenagers, and his most recent book, The Secret Public defines how L-G-B-T-Q resistance has shaped popular culture. He’s also written for the Observer, the New Statesman, and Mojo, and is not afraid to speak their mind. I’m very grateful he made time to be here today. Please welcome to the show, Jon Savage.
Jon, thank you. It’s wonderful to have you on. I saw that you moved to Wales, is that correct?
JON SAVAGE: Yeah, I’m still here.
RS: Oh, that must be beautiful.
JS: It is, except when there’s a storm.
RS: I’ve seen some of your pictures on Instagram. It looks very nice. I’m sure regardless of the weather.
JS: Better than London.
RS: Why did you move out of London?
JS: Couldn’t stand it anymore.
RS: What didn’t you like?
JS: Just the noise. Too many people. I didn’t have enough money then to buy somewhere bigger.
“If you’ve got people telling you’re shit from day one, to be yourself, and, to be who you are, is an act of resistance.”
RS: You’ve been a music journalist, a critic, and an author since the early seventies, first at Sounds and then at Melody Maker. My first question was, why were you drawn to youth culture?
JS: It’s that it was the only thing to me that was happening when I was a young teenager. I was born in ’53 and so I heard the Beatles in ’63. I saw the whole sixties happen in front of my eyes. So why would I not be fascinated?
Certainly, when I left university and was coming out into the world. What cultural artifact told me what I needed to know? It wasn’t a novelist, it wasn’t Martin Amis, it wasn’t poetry, it was the Ramones. So, it’s always been music. I think some people quite like music. Other people are obsessed and I’m one of those who are obsessed with music.
RS: Tell me about The Secret Public, there’s a similarity to the influence of that community on culture, et cetera. Just talk to me about that and how you see it impacting the world.
JS: Pop culture is soft power. Hard power is politics, media, everyday news, et cetera. Culture is soft power, it’s seeing somebody strange walking down the street, it’s listening to a record that turns your head and stays with you and makes you look at the world differently, or it’s a book or it’s a painting.
Pop culture, since 1955 – the advent of rock – has been incredibly important for lesbians, gays, and bisexual trans people in giving them visibility at a time when they were illegal. It was illegal to be a male homosexual, to express who you were, your sexual and emotional life, until 1967. So, this was a time of great repression and amid this time of great repression, you have Little Richard.
How does that work? Little Richard self-identifies as bisexual and had a lot of gay experiences. His first hit, Tutti Fruiti, the original lyrics are all about anal sex, so this is extraordinary. It goes into the American top 30 in early ’56, right in the middle of the McCarthy era. So, it’s resistance but it’s couched in popular culture, it’s couched in novelty.
“It’s always interesting when pop culture becomes a national issue. Very interesting things happen when pop becomes a national issue.”
It’s couched in a language that adults don’t understand, but teenagers do. So, the book covers 1955, 1967, 1973, and 1978, and there are people like Andy Warhol, Johnny Ray, James Dean, Elvis, Joe Meek, and Robert Stigwood. Brian Epstein, Dusty Springfield, Janice Joplin, David Bowie, New York Dolls, Lou Reed, early disco, Sylvester, the Bee Gees, et cetera. So, there are a lot of artists in there who all have some relevance to the general topic.
RS: The takeaway I get from the book is its impact on culture and change, maybe not necessarily opinions, but just infiltrating the mainstream, whether it be fashion, whether it be music, whether it be design. Is that true?
JS: I mean, the biggest band in the world was The Beatles, who were packaged by a gay manager. So, the queer influence on pop music is extraordinary. Historically it was a place where L-G-B-T-Q people could find a home.
RS: When you say resistance, what I like about that word is it has a duality to it. It’s almost on one level about public resistance, going against that community and then it’s also about a community doing something. I was curious why you called it the resistance.
JS: Well, because if you’ve got people telling you you’re shit from day one, to be who you are, is an act of resistance in itself. The act of becoming who you are is an act of resistance. And these people were doing it in public, so it’s incredibly brave.
In many ways, the book’s called The Secret Public because for a long time, the existence of queer people was a secret, but at the same time, they were the public. They were just as much public as anybody else. They had jobs, they paid their taxes. They attempted to live normal lives, but they couldn’t. Because of society’s oppression.
RS: So, what do you think are the important aspects of youth culture today? Are there any?
JS: Well, to be honest, I’m not up on it, I tend to focus on music. I realize there are malign influences targeting young men, which of course I disapprove of, but I don’t experience them because I’m not a young man.
So, all I see is music. And music is, and always will be a great form of communication. The only thing I have to note about music is it seems to be dominated by young women, which seems to be a very interesting and enjoyable state of affairs.
RS: So, what do you think about Spotify, the streaming services, corporatization of music? It seems there’s very little room for idiosyncrasy.
JS: Except more people are releasing records than ever before. The problem is not that people don’t have access to releasing records. The problem is how do you get attention?
When I started in the music press in 1977, it was very easy to get attention. All you needed was a feature in the NME or Sounds. A new band might get record company interest, but it’s not like that anymore.
That’s just the way things are. I don’t see it as being good or bad. It’s just different, and you must adapt. I’m certainly not one of those people who keeps on saying, you know, “It was better in my day.”
A lot of things were worse in my day. I think it’s horses for courses. I play records, I listen to MP3s, I play CDs. I use Spotify, it’s convenient. But it’s weighted against the artist, and in that respect, it’s much like life in general at this moment, which is a massive transfer of power to the plutocrats, and that’s right across society.
RS: Let’s jump back to the beginning then, The Filth and the Fury and all of that. Those moments back in ’75, ’76, and ’77, spawned a lot of offspring. Do you think all of that had a long-term impact?
JS: I don’t have an enormous amount to say about punk now. The only thing I can observe is that it has spread worldwide. People take from it what they can, and what they seem to take from it is the idea of doing things for themselves, which I think is very healthy.
That would certainly be one lesson that it would be great for people to take from punk, that you can just do it yourself. If there’s something you want to say or if you want to play an instrument or write, then you can just do it.
RS: Do you thinkthe characterization of punk was driven by the media?
JS: Well, you’re talking about London Punk, and certainly London Punk, early English punk was an explicit engagement with the media, so yes, it was very important. And obviously, the “Grundy incident” in December ’76 changed the whole thing and made punk stupid.
“When I left university and was coming out into the world, what cultural artifact told me what I needed to know? It wasn’t the novelists. It wasn’t Martin Amis. It wasn’t poetry. It was the Ramones.”
Helped to promote punk, and at the same time helped to make it a national issue. It’s always interesting when pop culture becomes a national issue, which it did again with Oasis and Blur, and that’s one of the reasons so many people want to see Oasis again because that was the last time that pop music was a national issue. Very interesting things happen when pop becomes a national issue.
The whole point about the Sex Pistols boat trip and the Jubilee was that it was a perfect anti-story to the world’s media who came to cover the Jubilee. The mediation was incredibly important; punk was partly critical, and punk was partly fascinated by the media, so it was complicated.
RS: I know you did a fanzine with Linder, the artist Linder Sterling. What was inspiring you at that time?
JS: Well, I’d always liked small magazines, so I liked ZigZag when Pete Frame did it and they did West Coast stuff, and then there was a man called Brian Hoke who did a fanzine called Bam, which was wonderful.
That was in ’74 and ’75, and they mainly dealt with the sixties. They’d have The Kinks on the cover, so it was all that kind of hard mod stuff, and then Sniffing Glue. I was very inspired by John Hartfield, the German artist in the Weimar period. Compendium Books. There was a montage book by a man called Claude Pallia and that was an inspiration as well. So, it was just a wonderful period.
It was art as a form of communication rather than as a form of instant communication as opposed to being in a gallery or being theorized about. It was just practice rather than theory.
RS: I saw you interviewed with JG Ballard. You interviewed him about his book High Rise.
JS: He just seemed to be very pertinent to what was going on, and I remember driving out to see him, I had an advanced cassette of The Scream by Siouxsie and the Banshees, and it seemed to all go together.
RS: You’re a big fan of that album?
JS: Yes, it’s great. I mean, I saw Siouxsie a lot in ’77 or ’78. I became disinterested in the Clash in 1978, I was interested in Buzzcocks, who presented a different kind of masculinity, and Subway Sect, who also presented a different kind of masculinity. They weren’t being macho, they weren’t being violent, and I was also very interested in the women who were coming through. The Slits, X-Ray Spex in particular.
“I think the problem is that punk was a product of scarcity and focus. At the time, it seemed as though nothing was happening.”
RS: I have one last question for you, and I don’t know if this is something you’ve thought about, but do you think there will be a cultural revolution like punk again? Do you think we need that? Is that something that could happen again?
JS: I don’t know. These things are historically specific. Punk is 50 years old now. It was a wonderful period for black music, ’76, ’75, and ’76. But it wasn’t a great period for white music it seemed as though nothing was happening. So that was one thing, and now there’s too much happening. And secondly, McLaren and Westwood were able to focus on something.
There weren’t that many music magazines. Hundreds of thousands of young people every week read the music press. In retrospect it was ridiculous. You’re not going to get that concentration of media again.
RS: In your book, England’s Dreaming, you trace the history of the beginning of punk through Churchill, and you talk about the Mohican and the Paris riots and that confluence of situations. It seems that Jamie Reid and Malcolm McLaren were just messing about in many ways, and things just seemed to happen. Is that a fair assessment or do you think it was coming for a while?
JS: I think Jamie and Malcolm glamorized 1968. I think they felt its pull, I think it inspired them, gave them something to work with, and they transmuted it into different forms. So, I think it’s valid in that respect. It’s an entirely different media landscape now, and it’s an entirely different situation.
If I was a young person, the thing that I would be concerned about would be climate change.
“The only thing I have to note about music today is it seems to be dominated by young women, which is a very interesting and enjoyable state of affairs.”
RS: Is that something that you’re concerned about?
JS: Very much so because it affects everybody on the planet.
RS: Is it something where you’re actively trying to make a difference?
JS: It’s something I observe. I’m not involved in any organizations trying to make a change. I try to live responsibly, and it’s something that I worry about a great deal. So, if I were a young person now, I wouldn’t be involved in pop culture. I would be involved in activism concerning climate change.
RS: What do you think about the Just Stop Oil movement and Extinction Rebellion? Do you think they can achieve anything?
JS: It all depends on whether you think that nonviolent forms of protest can achieve anything. And I remain equivocal.
RS: All right, well, thank you Jon.